stripethree

This is for all my non Arizona friends and family who think my descriptions of the monsoon storms are lacking. Here’s some pictures I took off my balcony a little more than a week ago that show the craziness.

6:20pm. Just starting to rain, but still appears pretty clear overhead.

6:22pm. Still appears sunny, but it’s pouring and suddenly extremely windy. That’s not the camera taking a fuzzy picture, that’s the rain. A ton of it, and it’s nearly coming in sideways.

6:25pm. Slowing down already. Hello huge raindrops. Sometimes these make to the ground as hail.

6:27pm. All but stopped, for now, and appearing completely sunny again. Lots of standing water in the lot across the street, and there was the usual 8-9 inches of it in the one part of the parking lot that doesn’t drain well.

So there you have it, flash flood warnings and all.

Oh monsoon season. How I was not thrilled to experience your effects through the ceiling of my bedroom. Nothing awful, but there was the small irony of coming home from buying a new, real bed (thankfully not here, but will be next Monday) to leaks in the bedroom ceiling. Looks like the drainage above my place and the apartment adjacent to me could not handle the wind and rain, got clogged, and thus, water in the bedroom! The apartment place has fixed the drainage issue, and a day’s worth of airing out the bedroom seems to have gotten rid of any musty smell. There’s some nice stains on the ceiling and I’ll have to make sure they come back to make sure there’s no standing water to grow something ugly. That was Saturday.

Sunday we went tubing on the Salt River up in Mesa, which was pretty fabulous. There were ten of us and multiple coolers of beer (ok, and some bottled water) floating down the river for a few hours. Yes, you can rent tubes to float your cooler with you. It’s obvious some other groups had this down to a science, including multiple person floats that could hold a party our size all at once. People had radios, one group even had marshmallows, more of which they seemed to throw at others than actually eat. We simply rented tubes and had some good will sourced sheets to wrap them in since sitting in a black rubber tube in the Arizona summer heat is about as comfortable as putting our hand on a hot stove. We attempted such glorious feats as: shotgun that beer because the cooler is full, how fast can three people drain the bottle of Arbor Mist, can I stand on my inner tube while floating down the river and if so can I empty a Miller Lite while doing so, and how much river water did that beer get into it and should I keep drinking it. There was even the occasional projectile seaweed fight.

Good times, and the weather was good too, wasn’t even that hot. For Arizona, at least.